The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

THE PHILIPPINES SANTIAGO BOSE Payson at Rebolusyon (Passion and Revolution) 1989 Installation Santiago Bose was born in 1949 in Baguio City, the Philippines. A tireless experimenter in medium, he was a pioneer in the use of indigenous materials. None of his work is done in traditional oil on canvas; instead, he blurs the distinction between two- and three­ dimensional art. He has used found objects, such as bamboo nose flutes, driftwood, holy pictures, paper bills and empty bottles in assemblages. He not only discovers media, he invents them, as in his use of volcanic ash treated for a hard sculptural effect. His artistic inventiveness has gone hand-in-hand with strong communal concerns. Most of his works touch on the struggles of the Cordillera folk, such as the one on the subject of a projected damwhich would submerge entire ancestral lands. Santiago Bose, whose source of inspiration has been the traditional cultures of the Cordilleras, has consistently used indigenous symbols, such as the Manunggul 32 Jar and the bu/ul [a primitive sculpture representing a rice god]. as expressive of the people's enduring spirit. In his sojourn in the United States, he probed cultural ironies by juxtaposing these symbols against contemporary images of the First World: the Manunggul Jar with its two ancient boatmen against the Manhattan skyline, or the bulul spirit figure holding its own in a Greyhound bus. The theme of migration and its cultural displacements, and its effects, superficial or traumatic, on the native wanderer have always fascinated the artist. In his home country, drawn to thecults of Mount Banahaw, he has done an installationwith a striking use of indigenous materials: dried branches massed together to forman improvised group of nativist religious symbols in the forested slopes of the sacred mountain. The Trade wars installation is spread out like an open-air market. A shed, consistingof a sunshade and a mat holding local wares, constitutes a unit representing a place, such as the Philippine island groups, Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao, or large is!ands. The terracotta jars represent localwares arranged with the bricks as village structures. However, in the background are piles of boxes, their logos indicating their origin as Western products, thus bringing out the theme of 'tradewars'. Moreover, theseare not 'neutral' products, but are often harmful to health and the natural environment. Texts and visual elements printed on the sunshades give statistics on specific ecological issues, such as soil erosion, strip mining, deforestation, and the dumping of ecologically hostile products on theThirdWorld. Santiago Bose's committed art has a political dimension, upholding indigenous values and national identity over and against external interests. Alice Guillermo